Archive for October, 2011

In the About Us section of our website, we shared our experience in creating our first website a few years ago, and expecting a flood of orders that never arrived. After two years of completing an “extreme makeover” of our company, including a new and much improved website that we launched one month ago, we’re still not in flood territory, but rain clouds are forming. We’re getting a relatively steady number of visits to our site, and we’ve received a few orders each week. We’ve also received a few more answers to prayer (someday, we’ll share these in an effort to encourage you), which have given us the encouragement we need to keep the faith. In addition, I’ve created four new cards, which puts me ahead of my schedule to create a new card every one to two weeks. The new cards are: Neighbors (Adult Birthday), Gifts (Christmas), A Simple Christmas Message (Christmas) and Cupcakes (Youth Birthday). Feel free to let us know how you like our new cards. Also, if you have any requests for cards you’d like to see on our site, please let us know – we’ll consider creating one or more of these for you.

Christmas is less than three months away, and this means it is time for us to add more Christmas cards to our small but growing collection.

Today, we created a bright and cheery Christmas card using red and white as the predominant colors, and added green, orange and blue for accent. Our idea to use red as a background and a white square shape came from a Macy’s advertisement, which showed a number of shoppers holding white Macy’s shopping bags against a red background.

We created this card in Adobe Illustrator, and used a Bamboo pen to draw the line that connects the stars at the top of the card. The stripes in the middle and left gifts are retro patterns from Adobe Photoshop.

The card appears more secular on the outside than our other Christmas cards, but retains a good Christmas message on the inside.

We priced this card a little lower than the others, as it did not involve the purchase of an image from an artist.

Although our website is not currently set up for volume discounts on card purchases, we plan to add this feature in the near future.

Today, Skip Rice from KTLF (90.5 FM) radio interviewed us to learn about our Christian greeting card business. The interview will be aired at 7:40 am on Friday, October 14. While we weren’t overly pleased with our performance during the interview, we hope listeners will nonetheless understand why we created this business, and how it may help them send cards in a fast and cost-effective way, thereby saving them time and money.

We like the idea of using sheep as an image in our humorous cards, as this gives us an easy link to a Bible story or concept (the word “sheep” is used more than 200 times in the Bible using the New International Version).

When researching verses that would apply to one particular card we had planned to create of soccer-playing sheep, the following “hit home.” Let me show you the verses first, and then tell you what I mean.

1 Corinthians 9:19-22 19 “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”

While it is true that we believe God wanted us to create a Christian greeting card company, and we have done so to the best of our abilities, the above verses brought to light what we have not done well – winning others to Christ. As a result, we plan to offer several cards that Christians (including ourselves) can use to witness to the lost in the hopes of winning them to Christ.